


Blurred, as movement blurs

by SharpestRose



Category: Smallville, Supergirl, Superman (Comics), Young Justice (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-29
Updated: 2011-06-29
Packaged: 2017-10-20 20:22:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dozen contradictory truths, and she's lived all of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blurred, as movement blurs

At first, she tried to perceive the world in terms of generations, parentage. Legacies. It became harder as time wore on. Then it slipped away, eventually. Like all things must.

Once, early on, she'd met him for the first time again (this was soon after that concept had ceased to frighten in and of itself) and his beard had prickled her palm as she dared a hesitant touch. Such funny red hair. It had made her giggle and the sound had fractured and for a moment she worried that she was going mad. Later, she knew that she hadn't been. Not then.

He had looked so funny with his red beard.

She steals the briefcase almost by accident. The action is habit, familiar when nearly nothing else has ever been (perhaps, once, something else was. A scent, a sound. Or maybe that was just deja vu. She cannot tell, it is all just circuits and chemistry in her brain). It isn't until she has it and is well out of sight that she realises what she's done.

She wants to take it back and apologise. It's difficult to forget the way the old games are played. The way she's done it before, so often. Like a dance. Like rehearsal, her fingers holding the barre for balance as she stands, tip-toed, and moves one arm in an arc. Dancing for girls, fencing for boys, didn't someone tell her that once? Early on. Trixie, maybe. Or Lena. She cannot remember which of them had the small mole on the line of her jaw below her left ear. One of them did. Maybe both. Maybe it was her, in a mirror somewhere. Through a glass darkly.

But now the rules are different, and there is no reason for the case. She doesn't care anymore. She can't. She must stop coming here, through the rows of sharp-leafed corn like a thousand little worlds stretching out around her. Her bones will flake and crumble if she lets herself care, but what else is there anymore but the corn and the open air? Vast and crisp and asleep all around her. She wonders if Lana will make Lex a coffee now that they're done going over budgets. Lana does that sometimes. In a few minutes they will notice that the briefcase is gone.

She stops on the edge of a field and lets herself vanish between the stalks, the terrain of the land familiar enough to disorient her. Too much like home, too much like coming back when she has long taught herself to look forward and forward.

She misses Conner as she fumbles with the combination of the case. Conner, who only had to brush his fingers across something to make it come undone. He made her come undone, trite as the metaphor feels in her head. Pressed her up against a wall or on the floor and fucked her until she cried a name, any name. There are so many names.

Sometimes Conner would take her choice to be a death warrant, a naming of the damned. Other times, the opposite and he'd spare the one whom she had called for. He was trying to get a reaction from her but it never worked. They were just names.

When thinking in terms of time and lineage had proved useless, she tried relationships as a way to link and connect. That proved even more of a farce than the idea of time had been, of course.

It was then that she had realised that nothing meant anything and she laughed until the fracture became a crack became a break and her thoughts sharded into splinters and cut her up into a thousand smaller girls.

She had been lucky, though. The Lex there had been clever and kind, and had put her back together carefully until she was only the usual amount of broken. She'd woken up in a hospital bed beside a window with a tree outside the window and she'd turned and said "

where's your funny beard?

" and Lex looked worried, one of his hands moving up to ghost across the smooth curve of his head. Waking up properly, she'd apologised. Promised him that she wasn't nuts anymore. That, for her this was normal as it got.

Three weeks later, somewhere else, Lex had broken her arm. She thought of the bed and the window beside the bed and the tree outside the window and. Normal as it got.

The case opens and there's not much in it. A phone, some documents. A few pens made of what looks like marble but might not be, because does anyone really make a pen out of marble? She remembers the marbles Conner had, so shiny and green.

No, not marbles. She tries to think of the word, the word for old bullets. Maybe they're just called bullets, even round and heavy not-marbles like that. She thinks she knew the word (if there ever was a word) once. Little green marbles in the gun and Conner threw up later. She thought it was the guilt that did it. But it was just the marbles.

She'd kept one after she shot him. She'd thought about swallowing it. Letting it choke her. It felt appropriate. But in the end she just left it behind. There's a symbol there, but she's lost the key of reading symbols.

She presses the numbers into the phone like she's dreaming. Habits die hard, especially when nothing about her's easy to kill at the best of times.

"Hello?"

It's only then that she realises how late it is, that Martha was probably asleep. "Who's there?"

"Wrong number," she says softly, and presses 'disconnect'.

She will need a name. Things become confusing quickly without one, at least for those around her. She finds it easier to go without, to live outside those oh-so-complicated rules and titles. But, no. A name should be chosen. She keeps so many in her head. Nobody else is left to remember.

Conner would have liked this world. He would have smiled, tight-lipped. He liked it when it was easy to get close. When Lex was young. Patricide, Conner always said, was best done to one who understood the impulse, who saw it in your eyes. Otherwise it was like murder.

That's crows, she'd answered once. Black feathers, caw caw. Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye.

He'd dipped his hands in Lex's still-warm blood and slapped her so hard she'd lost a tooth, and as she started laughing she noticed that her reflection in the spreading liquid was distorted, dark. Blurred, as movement blurs. Forward and forward.

She'd killed Conner the next day, wondering if there was a term for the killing of a nephew and if he understood the impulse she'd had. Nothing meant anything anyway, so perhaps it didn't matter.

She suspects she is fifteen. She keeps count of days and months but may have lost track from time to time

(window, bed, tree, normal)

. A memory sticks to her like flaky gore, one of the unique events she has not lived through variations of a hundred times. That was something Conner only told her later on, that reality was hexagonal, a honeycomb of ifs and buts and maybes. Even with a shiny toy like his, tiny in his palm with its dials and buttons, they could only jump one hexagon each time. So they only ever had a one in six chance of going backwards, and the further along they got the less likely they'd ever see home. The numbers involved had made her head hurt, and she hadn't even been crazy then.

But, whatever. It's not like she had anything to stay around for in her own world. She'd planned to hang with Conner for a while until she found somewhere just the same as where she'd come from, only without the bad things that had made her want to leave in the first place. A perfect world. There had to be one somewhere, right?

Conner had laughed and laughed at that and then he'd been crying not laughing and he said that there was nothing good, nothing, and all they had was a chance to get revenge where they could and then die young. She'd thought him crazy, then, and now that stings her like the whip of a scorpion.

Instead of a beehive of worlds, she imagines a vine dividing and dividing, twined and knotted in the dark. The tulgy wood, like the jabberwocky poem. She used to think herself the heroine, running through and snared on sharp branches, tripped and caught by that winding vine.

Then she looked in a mirror sometime somewhere and her hair was pulled off her face in a ponytail with such force that her features were pinched and sharp and strained and strange and foxlike. A predator, after all.

Conner had once said that Luthors had never lacked for heirs. That there was a compulsion in them to infect (he'd used that word and she'd flinched but he hadn't picked another to replace it) the population as much as they could. But, no. Conner and Lena and Trixie and any other children Lex might have made somewhere out in the honeycomb, they were something different than an infection. Something she has no word for, perhaps never had a word for. She doesn't know what she thinks about so many things, stray tiles from mosaics long-crumbled.

Sometime, somewhere, she'd woken up to find a girl with red cornrows and one blue eye and one green eye sitting beside her, watching.

"You're one of mine now, aren't you?" the girl had said. She was playing with a deck of cards. The queen had a crown made of green marble. "The shattered ones are all mine. The dolls nobody wants to play with anymore, on account of all the fractures."

And she had thought, _no_ , because she already belonged to so many people already. So many of everyone, and there were so many inside her head, and nothing meant anything, and the deck of cards was the deck of a ship now and everything was tilting woozily with the tides.

"Silly." The girl with the strange eyes smiled. "You can be all of theirs and still be just mine, you know."

Those words echo, like air inside a cave, doubling back on themselves and folding. She has heard Lex say those words to Clark, standing on the balcony of the penthouse with sirens somewhere distant far below and the wind catching the red of Clark's cape and Lex's breath misting the scant air between the two of them. _You can be all of theirs, and still be mine and mine alone._

She can't remember if that was a good world or not. If Conner and the others had found them, in the end. Eventually, everyone just belonged to death.

Usually things happened earlier than the world she knew first, rarely was the timeline skewed even as late as the one she's in now. It's like time-travel, only it's the world shifting and her that's staying in the same place in history. But there was one time, years ago (if years meant anything but they don't) when they'd ended up smack-dab in the meteor shower.

They'd all been split up, in the confusion. None of them had been there (then?) before and there was screaming and fire and she'd run, run to the fields she knew. She'd meant to hide Clark from Conner, maybe, because it was a rare treat for Conner to find a world where Clark was vulnerable. If it hadn't been such a ridiculous case of pot-calling-the-kettle-black, she might have called Conner on his psychosis, but as it was she never did. Just undermined where she could. As if anything would have meaning, as if it made any difference.

It wasn't Clark she'd found, though, there in the field. Lex, with his funny red hair and school uniform, was so unexpected that she'd jumped back in surprise.

She just grabbed his hand and ran, pulling and dragging him until they were relatively safe.

"What -" he'd gasped, inhaler lost among the stalks during the escape. "What's going on?"

"I don't know," she'd lied. "What's your name?"

"Lex." No last name given. No lineage. No connection. She thought that maybe he'd turn out okay, if he kept that mindset.

"What's yours?"

What had she answered? She can't remember, so in playing the memory she speaks the truth. It's likely she did at the time, too. She has never learned the knack of lying to Lex.

"Mercy." No last name from her, either. She's known too many to choose one.

Mercy was born in autumn and her hair was pale like dry grass with hints of brighter copper in some lights. Strawberry blonde, her father had called it. Her nose freckled every summer, as if to remind her that she was born for colder times. She had a mother, and a father, and a brother as many years older than her as Mercy is now. My two lucky stars, her mother called them together. My two miracles.

Mercy would beg for the story over and over again at bed time

(window, bed, tree, normal)

, as if her mind knew it must train itself to stand repetition or crumble.

Once upon a time, her brother would say, a boy fell out of the sky. A kind man and a kind lady found him.

"Then what happened?" she would interrupt, chewing on the tip of her toy cat's ear even though everyone told her what a great habit that was. "Did he feel lonely?"

"Hush, I'm getting to it, slow down. A kind man and a kind lady found him and looked after him, and he was happy. But -"

"He was lonely!" she would cry in triumph.

" _No_." A smile with the correction. "Not exactly. But he wanted somebody to take care of, who would love him without worrying about him all the time. Sometimes he would wish for a -"

"Sister!"

"... _brother_. But he was alone. Then one day, something magical happened."

"Magic's not real. I want you to tell it properly."

"I am. Be quiet, and put that cat down. I've told you not to chew it. One day, something unexpected happened, and the boy got his wish. The cradle that had protected him on his journey through the stars had been designed to help him however it could. A bit like a really really good babysitter."

"Lana's a good babysitter."

"Yes, I know."

"She lets me have sugar straight from the jar."

"Do you want to hear this story or not? Wait, she _what_?"

"Haha, caught you."

"Mercy." Her brother's look was stern.

"Okay, okay, sorry. Keep going with the story."

"Put the cat down. Okay, where was I?"

"Your spaceship fixed Mom."

"Right. And so the boy got a little sister, who was really annoying most of the time and ate tomatoes every day, which isn't weird until you consider that she ate them like normal people eat apples. And she was just generally a freak and the boy decided never to ask for anything ever again in case his ship heard. The end."

"Hey! That's not right. You're stupid, _and_ you're a fine one to talk about freaks."

"Goodnight, Mercy."

"Hmph."

She'd been nine when everything she loved was dead and she'd run and run and how depressing was it that there was the whole world full of stuff she could have had with the money now hers and she just didn't want any of it.

Conner had found her crying and he must have been about sixteen then (he seemed so old then and now she's nearly that herself yet feels so young still nine somewhere in her head somewhere) and he said "I can give you a hundred million places that aren't here and a thousand ways to be alive", which sounded really good. So she said "yes".

There was a space between, of course. Between everything. Between honeycombs, perhaps, and one day she'll fall into that space and it will be dark and quiet and there will be a bed and a window beside the bed and a tree outside the window.

A space between the bedtime stories and the promise of a hundred million places. A space where she was growing up and happy and there was only one of her in her head. Then there was the storm, because there were always storms. This storm had

had

There hadn't been any Mommy or Dad after that and there was just dark and rain and the windows were all broken, glass everywhere, and eventually someone had come and found her and she'd screamed for Clark, because Clark couldn't be dead he was _Clark_ and her mother had always said that Clark would look after her no. matter. what. Even if something happened to their parents.

So she had screamed. Lex had held her and rocked her and said no, Clark was gone, he'd identified the body himself. Clark had drowned.

There had been lots of meteor rocks under the river, Mercy found out later. Always those little green poisons crept in and twisted the story skewed.

Four years with Lex before he'd been gone, too. A car accident, and wasn't the irony just so perfect? She laughed and laughed and wept and oh, the poetry of it. She'd heard the story of their first meeting, after all. She'd asked for it nearly as often as she'd asked for the story of her origins. And here they were, dead by reckless driving and water. Fate finds a way to collect all debts, eventually.

But not Mercy. She will outrun it. Forward and forward.

That was long ago now, though. She'd met Conner and began the maze of vines and hexagons, jumping from world to world to world in search of somewhere she could call home again. She's met every possible version, variation. Of everyone.

She has seen herself a grown woman, sleek and beautiful and deadly. Fighting Clark in his stupid cape. Protecting Lex. She has seen Lex with his funny red beard and dear sweet little Trixie, his Matrix baby made out of cleverness and determination and magic (she knows now magic is real, but called science. Alchemy), everything Conner should have been. Could have been. She has seen Clark get married and thrown rice for him in the chapel. She was seen Clark save her and save the town and save the world. She has seen Lex as Mr President and as the head of multinational companies and as just Lex, at a dozen ages and with a dozen histories behind him. She has seen him kill, ruin, destroy. She has seen him die.

She has seen Conner kill Lex uncountable times, uncountable ways. Revenge for what, she doesn't know. Conner never said anything much about where he came from, only that those responsible would pay. And they have, in a thousand worlds. Lex, Clark. She's watched them die as children and adults and old men. As heroes and villains and ordinary people. She has cried for them, and laughed.

None of it means anything.

But in the end, she killed Conner. She can't remember why. There must have been a reason, even if it was a meaningless one. She can't have chosen to be alone in the universe without a reason.

She remembers one world much like this one, where she'd warned Lex and Clark about Conner and told them the whole story of herself. She did that, sometimes. In the beginning. She'd stolen that necklace Lana sometimes had and told Lex to wear it, that it would keep Conner from getting too close.

"Be careful, though. That stuff messes people up if they're around it too long," she'd warned.

"But Lana wears this all the time, and she's fine," Clark protested. She'd looked at him, bemused.

"You have met Lana, right?" she'd asked, and Lex had coughed to cover a snigger.

Even remembering them now makes her heart hurt, just a bit. She loves them both so much. All of them, every guise. They're always them at the core. She would know them anywhere. She would know them in the dark, without sound or touch.

She has watched them through windows, on balconies and in bedrooms and in the barn loft. Kisses and whispered words and roving hands and spit-slicked skin. She has seen them live happily ever after (and then Conner, with his gun full of marbles, and in the end everyone belongs to death), and seen them fall apart with lies and silences.

She has seen everything, save for the darkness between the honeycombs.

And now she's running back out of the field. She's not sure why. Maybe to return the briefcase; she has left it back behind her somewhere. Can't go back. Have to run, a hundred million places that aren't here left to find still. On and on, and it's going to be raining soon.

And then she stumbles

(trips on the vine)

and everything goes black as she falls.

When she wakes up, she's tucked into a bed and there are low voices somewhere near. Her head hurts, and there's a raw feeling along her cheek. A scrape, then. She fell and hit her head and scraped her face, and someone came and found her. Her hair feels damp, which tells her two things: it was already raining before she was found (of course, because everyone who knows her is inside her head and there's nobody left otherwise), and she hasn't been asleep long. Her ankle feels like it has broken into a thousand pieces. She will have to ask Clark to check it for her.

"... found her out by the road."

"She had my cellphone in her hand. The one that was stolen..."

"We can't just take in every stray..."

That one is Jonathan. Dad. She knows that voice, even though she hears it far less frequently than most others. Dad, who believed in charity beginning at home. Too worried about his children (child, here and now) to have much pity to spare for the rest of the world.

"Jonathan -" Her mother's voice. Soft, sensible. Mercy turns her face away, as if to block the sound from her ears. This was her room, in that world a thousand hexagons ago. It's just a spare, here. Neat bed. Window with the curtains pushed back. The scratch of branches on the glass. It's not morning yet, but the rain has died down. She tries to sit up and falls back with a mewl of pain. She must have fallen hard on her shoulder.

"She looks malnourished. I'd suggest taking her up to the hospital," Lex says out in the corridor. It hurts to cry, the tears sting Mercy's eyes and she wonders if her face is more beat up than it first felt. Fate's catching up with her, breaking her apart.

"I think we should keep her here." Clark's voice. She wants to keep listening to the argument, if only to hear there voices. All here, and none of it has started yet (or if it has, just barely). And she's tired. So tired.

She closes her eyes.

(window, bed, tree, normal)

The hinges creak as the door opens. This room is not often used.

"Hi," Martha says softly. "I thought I heard you in here. How're you feeling?"

"Like -" Mercy manages to say. _Like shit_ , she almost says before catching herself. Once when she was a kid, Mom washed her mouth out with soap for swearing. "Like I've been hit by a truck?" she hazards.

"We'll get you checked out at the medical centre as soon as you're up to moving around," Martha promises as she sits down on the edge of the bed. She smells like home. "What's your name?"

Lex and Clark and Jonathan are still talking in the hallway, hushed voices like the swell and dip of the ocean's sound.

"Mercy," answers Mercy.

"I've always thought that would be lovely on a little girl. My great aunt was named Mercy, you see."

"Yes," Mercy says and then, when she realises that this sounds weird as a reply, adds "sorry, I'm."

Pause.

"A bit crazy, I guess. A lot, even."

"Oh, no, I'm sure you'll be fine once you've had some sleep. You fainted in the rain, you're bound to feel a little out of sorts."

And then Martha reaches out and strokes Mercy's hair gently and Mercy has to bite back a sob. Or perhaps a howl.

"Get some rest now, and I'll bring up some soup later, okay?" Martha says and her voice is very gentle, as if she has noticed the tears Mercy is not crying.

Mercy nods and then the room is dark and quiet again and she is alone. There is wind outside, but she can only hear it and not feel it on her skin. She cannot feel anything anymore, and reminds herself of. Something. She can't remember what.

He had such a funny red beard. And there were green marbles, and a small mole on the edge of a girl's jawline. Once upon a time.

(blurred, as movement blurs.  
Her face in dark liquid)

She looks at the window, the glass like a ghostly rectangle in the dim room. The stars are all cloud-covered, but there's a little light from somewhere. Enough to see by. Everything is still beginning, here. She isn't even born yet. Anything can happen. Nothing means anything, and yet she feels the possibility well up behind her breastbone.

Her ankle throbs, as if to remind her that she cannot run anywhere now.

Strangely, she doesn't mind very much.


End file.
